It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.